I
am aware that long ago I wrote that after summer 1967, the Big Pink
days, I did not have any direct contact with Bob Dylan. Disguising
reality to increase poignancy is a recognised choice for years of
literary history and a highly effective tool in the land of the
documentary and its tributaries, as Scorsese has just shown us in his
“alchemic mix of fact and fantasy” broadcast on Netflix.
Nevertheless, at the end of the day, “rolling thunder” is an
image that for Native Americans means “speaking truth”, and Dylan
loved knowing this, according to Larry Sloman. Now, in 2019, I want
to tell my own truth as an integral part of that caravan full of
music, giving myself the same freedom to interweave lived experiences
and dreams, the ideal and the memory, what happened and what could
have been.
This
spring, while the media was brimming with images full of invented
colours (that of the Netflix poster, those that would make up the
booklet for the collection of CDs from the RTR and so many others),
while waiting for June to arrive to find out what Scorsese and the
Bootleg Series had done with that fragment of the past shared with
Dylan, I reread, time and again, that notebook with the brown covers
that he gave me in 1967, when I hitched my caravan at the doors of
Big Pink for a few months. To say goodbye, on the last page he had
written a kind of advance welcome, surrounding it with four schematic
but prophetic drawings. I smiled when I looked at them tonight, while
I listened to how This
Wheel's On Fire links
into Hurricane
and then into All Along
The Watchtower in the
fourth take of the second disc of the recently published The
RTR: The 1975 Live Recordings,
which gathers together part of what was rehearsed on 21st October
that year in the Studio Instrument Rentals from New York. Dylan's
voice, stitching together the past and the present with the thread of
Scarlet Rivera’s violin, makes the wounds of time scar over once
more.
If
your mem’ry serves you well,
we
were goin’ to meet again and wait ...
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